


come my way

by harmonising



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:41:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28047858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harmonising/pseuds/harmonising
Summary: 1957. Paul gets weird around October. John investigates.
Relationships: John Lennon & Paul McCartney, John Lennon/Paul McCartney
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	come my way

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a creative, fictional exploration of the dynamics between Lennon and McCartney as young people. No disrespect intended.
> 
> Please heed the tags! Although it doesn't go into explicit detail, this story does delve into themes of grief and mourning, as experienced by teenagers without the language to articulate those feelings. One character (John) goes through an anxiety attack without realising he is doing so; and the other (Paul) uses repetitive physical movements to self soothe, including nail biting. They're young and soft.

Paul got _weird_ in October. John hadn't known him long, but he did know him well enough already to understand when Paul's general weirdness had turned into something darker around the edges, brittle under an unknown pressure. It was a slow drag of a thing, hidden in plain sight, as most things with Paul were. _Never mind me, sir, 'm just a fat kid who can outplay you any day. Would have noticed earlier if you had_ looked _._

So look John did, made a point out of it. Paul had mentioned offhand once that he'd seen John before they'd met at the fête, a mysterious figure in black leather skulking around the chip shops. John was embarrassed for that version of him, the one snoring his merry way on the bus, who was stupidly unaware that he'd been meeting and missing Paul McCartney day in and day out.

Paul himself was fleeting at the best of times, airy, breezy, all smoke and mirrors and flickering light, like a fucking M. R. James story. John was the unlucky sod tasked with finding and understanding the ghostly vision of it. _Here is the specimen, tucked under me arm and giggling. It appears to be helplessly ticklish. It solidifies upon contact._

John danced around Paul's odd boundaries like he was rehearsing a waltz, or a bank robbery. Paul had never been particularly touchy, didn't stay too close to anyone if he could help it. He would put a hand to your elbow to get you out of his way, or delicately hold your wrist to redirect your shoddy playing, sure, but otherwise he would keep his distance.

It puzzled John, unnerved him, even, at times. He got very close once to cracking a few jokes about it, about how Paul's mam must not want him catching anything from these underclass mongrels he hangs out with now. Something had stopped him from doing so, however. John didn't mind sounding like a fool, he understood that he had a cruel streak a mile wide for most people. But Paul was different from most people in every way possible. Very touchy for someone who never touched anybody. So John kept his mouth shut for once in his life, weary of spooking him away too soon. He pushed the words down and just poked, prodded at Paul until he relented, smiling.

When Paul had put at least three Jesuses and a quarter of a mile to Bethlehem between him and everyone else when they went out for chips and beer the week after John's birthday, the distancing itself was not exactly _surprising_. But the way Paul would stare off into the distance these days, mumbling out a "Yeah" to anything anyone said short from "let's murder someone", _that_ was very much out of the ordinary.

John considered asking the others about the weirdness, then dimissed the thought almost immediately. He watched Len and Paul laugh at something Eric had said, how the two of them didn't seem to realise Paul was tap, tap, tapping his fingers against his legs, clenching and unclenching his fists in a nervous _something_. He was sure no one else was seeing it at all. Nobody else watched Paul so closely. None of them had such short sight. 

As the weeks rolled by, Paul kept _smiling_ and _smiling_ , wider each time. It twisted up his face into an ugly, unfamiliar mask. His teeth looked too sharp to John's eyes, his body curved in a way that made him look old and crooked, as if wrung out by some invisible hand. It was an unsettling sight, one that unfurled into something even worse when pressed.

It went as such: John told a stupid joke during practice, _a goat, a Welshman and the Prime Minister meet in heaven_ , and Paul, as if on cue, put on a weird smile in response. A bright, toothy thing. Disgusting. Act two, post intermission: John told _another_ stupid joke, the stupidity truly off the marks that day, and Paul's smile turned into a laughter that was so _perfectly_ modulated as to sound inhuman. It made John's skin crawl. 

"Dear heavens, but the boys are easy to amuse today, Sheila."

Paul snickered. "Be sure they leave a tip, Gloria," he said, voice effortlessly high pitched, throwing a teasing wink John's way.

It should have been friendly, but the normalcy of it had only made Paul look even more closed off, more so even than when they had been strangers meeting and unmeeting at random places. John looked at him, this smiling, stone version of his friend, and he didn't know what to do about it. 

He tried prying Paul open with chocolates and cigarettes, small treats like they were jailmates in a film and John was using bribes to get Paul to give him what he wanted. When they took a break for tea, John threw a tangerine at Paul's head, as affectionately as he knew how. _Hello, sir. A small contrabanded return to normalcy, please, sir. I won't tell the guards if you don't._

Paul remained impassive, at least to the untrained eye. He always chewed at his fingernails when no one was watching, something John had noticed a while ago. Right now, it seemed that he was getting just this close to the side of painful, giving tiny imperceptible winces whenever his fingers slipped on his guitar strings. The slipping in itself was also worrying, but John could only stomach so much nerves at once.

"You smell weird," he tried one day, two weeks into this mess, a last attempt at snapping Paul out of _whatever_ it was that he was in. 

Paul looked up from where he'd been strumming the same three chords over and over for five minutes. "What?" he asked, eyebrows raised in confusion.

John didn't _know._ "Precisely, my dear fellow."

Paul shrugged, went back to his guitar. John hoped he would make some kind of mistake so they could argue about it, so Paul could look at him again without shifting from foot to foot, as if itching to get away as soon as possible. The others remained blissfully unaware.

Naturally, John did not last long after that. Last ditch efforts for a friend who looked dead in the ditch, and all. He put on a jumper and left the house, tea still staining his teeth, calling out to Mimi's questions that he was out to save the world from certain doom.

He stood in the shadows of the corner to Vale Road with barely concealed nerves, waiting for Ivan like a robber. 

"Is McCartney dead?"

Ivan, to his credit, didn't so much as blink at John's tone. "Reckon we will all be, soon enough," he said, twirling his house keys on his fingers. "Dunno if _Paul_ is getting there any quicker than the rest of us. He's a pretty spry lad." 

After weeks of plastered on smiles, John was not amused. "What's _wrong_ with him, Vaughan? And don't say 'everything'," he warned when Ivan made to open his mouth. "Because I _will_ kick your teeth in." 

Something in Ivan seemed to shift at that, and he moved to stand right in front of John. The light from the lamppost behind them partially obscured his eyes, but John had run here from home, was was wearing his glasses for once. He could tell that Ivan was doing to him what John usually did to younger guys, the bright eyed ones who wanted into the band a little too much. 

He was _measuring John up_ , trying to sense if he could be trusted with whatever it was that Ivan that was about to say. It was an odd feeling, to be looked at like that. People usually just glanced at John and assumed, not always unfairly, that he shouldn't be trusted with anything. 

Ivan sighed. John waited for him to speak. "His mum is dead," he said, matter of fact but very soft. A car ran past them on the road. John shivered.

"When?" John heard himself ask, voice echoing as if he was very far away from himself, all of a sudden. At the pit of his stomach there was an acidic coat of senseless betrayal. _Why would Paul not tell him?_

"Coming up to a year next week," Ivan replied. He moved back to the wall, lighting a cigarette. His face was all shadow now, save for the burning tip of the smoke.

John could say nothing in return. He watched himself watch Ivan in silence. It was not the first time that he had felt tongue tied around an issue related to Paul, but this was the through the looking glass version of it, perverse and sad, nonsensical. Tut, tut, said the Duchess.

Ivan sighed again, and the sharp sound of it brought John back to himself long enough to hear him speak. "If you act like a prick about this," Ivan warned, his voice very level and very cold. It reminded John of Paul. "If you so much as _think_ a little quip at him about this, I will skin you alive, Lennon."

John nodded. His eyes were prickling, throat convulsing with a sharp ache. He needed to get away from Ivan before this turned into something really embarrassing, before he said something he would truly regret, like: _did he go to the funeral,_ or _who was there with him._

John got to Mendips in a daze. He greeted Mimi, greeted the cats, floating above his own body, untethered by this terrible new knowledge.

"Has the world been saved from certain doom, then?" Mimi asked from her armchair.

John nodded, though she could not see. "Yes," he eventually managed, his own voice sounding foreign to his ears. "Very tiny world, quick to save."

Mimi let out an amused sound at that. John took a deep breath. Then he climbed the stairs, walked to the upstairs bathroom, locked himself in and threw up.

John wasn't playing his guitar anymore, should probably put it down so his choking grip on its neck would not break the fucking wood, but he needed something between him and Paul, who was still, _still_ avoiding his eyes. 

It had been a mad idea, truly foolish, this "playing session" of theirs at John's. The foolishness of the whole enterprise was obvious from the beginning: John was notorious for making terrible decisions whilst under pressure, and the weekend following his conversation with Ivan had been nothing but pressure. John mulled over it relentlessly. _Like a dog with a bone_ , as Mimi would say. Ravenous and disturbed.

So it had been half on that nervous energy, half on his sleep deprived mind, that he had _walked_ down to Allerton and dragged Paul back to Woolton for this poor excuse for a friendly chat. On a Monday of all days. Master McCartney would surely be _delighted_ that John had absconded with his precious child on a schoolday.

Paul seemed unfazed. He was sitting across from John on the bed, mirror like, as always. Normally, the sight would amuse and delight John in equal parts. _There I am_ , he'd think, watching Paul's fingers move in tandem with his own. At present, that out of body sensation was back, but there was nowhere to project himself onto, not when Paul was fidgeting with his fretboard, beating a nervous rhythm between the strings. Airy, impossible to fucking grasp.

"Do you like me?" John asked. 

Paul's hands stilled, twitching fingers frozen mid movement. "What?" he blurted, sounding genuinely confused. John was surprised he could talk at all without using his hands.

"As your mate, your friend, _whatever_." John moved his own hands, an echo of Paul in him, trying to get his point across. "Because you've been weird all _month_ \--"

Paul squared his shoulders. "It hasn't affected my playing," he spat, eyebrows furrowed in sudden annoyance. But finally _there_ , finally _looking_.

"I don't care about your fucking _playing_ , Paul," John said. Which was a lie, of course, one that he would normally be glad to dismiss out of hand so Paul would stop looking so fucking _sad_ about it, but that he couldn't care less about now. "Ivan told me about your mother," he finished. The sentence felt open ended, stilted. It didn't feel right to call Paul's mother his _mum_. John hadn't known her, but he had always pictured her prim and proper--like an older Paul wearing an apron, holding a smaller Paul in her arms.

Paul didn't react at all to the news of John's little gossiping session with Ivan. The non reaction was to be expected, but it still smarted, made John feel like the worst person alive, a clumsy, thankless tosser whose tongue was too bitter, whose words always came out wrong.

What he wanted to say was: _Was there anyone there with you, at the funeral?_ What the soft, bruised fruit part of him wanted to say was: _I wish I could go back in time and bring her to you._ A wish so fierce, John felt sick with the intensity of it. He thought about George, who had died and who John didn't even get to say goodbye to. If John fancied himself a time traveller, he would go back to any happy morning with George, drinking tea, reading the news. He wondered what sort of person Paul's mother had been, whether she had Paul's eyes, his stubbornness.

It took Paul at least three minutes, the length of a whole song, to rearrange his face back into its placid mask. "Gonna kick out us orphans from the band, Mister?" he joked, trying for a terrible Dickens protagonist Cockney. Paul was smirking but it was bitter, twisted.

John couldn't find it in himself to joke about it. "No."

Paul's face crumbled at his sincerity, unfurling into itself almost as if against Paul's will. Paul chuckled, still no humour behind the sound, but _true_ , at least. "Not even if we go mad with it?" he prodded, fake accent forgotten. "What if the madness _spreads_?"

John shook his head. "Reeling and writhing," he said. "Basic stuff. As long as you know your numbers."

Paul dropped the smirk and _blushed_ , and that was probably the madness already spreading between them, contagious and sweet. John wanted to hug him, but he knew it wasn't allowed. 

"Besides," he started, unsure of where he was going. He nudged Paul's knee with his own.

Paul looked at him, smiled. "Besides?"

John shrugged. "It's _you_ , isn't it," he said. "Met you half mad already, can't exactly be _surprised_ about it now."

Paul laughed at that, his weird, high pitched one, that stopped and started in ugly little squeaks. John smiled back at him, the snakes in his stomach calmed for the time being, comforted into stillness by Paul playing his magical tune. Mad lad. 

The silence fell onto them like a warm blanket, comforting and soft. Paul's fingers got moving again. D, G, D, A7. Over and over, like a conversation. John did his best to echo it back at him. D, G, D, A7, something in his chest opening up.

**Author's Note:**

> There are a number of very silly references spread throughout, the most memorable of which are: Alice Through the Looking Glass; a bit of dialogue lifted from a reference John dropped during the Get Back/Let it Be sessions; and last but definitely not least: Buddy Holly.


End file.
